WELLINGTON, Sept. 5 (Xinhua) -- New Zealand Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) and the New Zealand Forest Owners Association are joining forces under the Government Industry Agreement (GIA) to improve forest biosecurity preparedness.
The first jointly-funded initiative under this partnership will be a forest biosecurity surveillance program designed to detect unwanted forest pests and pathogens in high-risk places, an MPI statement said on Wednesday.
The association and MPI recently signed the Commercial Plantation Forestry Sector Operational Agreement for Readiness under the GIA. This agreement establishes a new way of working in partnership between the two organizations and will see a doubling of efforts to improve forest biosecurity readiness, said Andrew Spelman, MPI's acting director of biosecurity readiness.
"This continuing partnership will build on the considerable contribution the forest industry has made to biosecurity to date, and we look forward to collaborating to improve biosecurity processes and outcomes for New Zealand," Spelman said.
Existing biosecurity readiness work in the sector includes an annual forest health survey, which the government started in the 1950s, but has been fully funded by industry since the 1990s.
It also includes MPI's High-Risk Site Surveillance Program, which looks for pests and diseases that could affect a range of native and exotic trees, including production species, according to the MPI.
